Shadowed
by Dracorum
Summary: FFIV. Companion story to Moondust. "I could never decide which I was more annoyed by; the fact that he'd showed up as if invited, or the fact that he'd left as if…as if he was not." Rydia's side of the story plus an extra appearance. Fluff, fluff, fluff


**Disclaimer: FFIV is the good property of Square Enix.**

A/N: A reading of my Moondust fic first is recommended in order to fully enjoy Shadowed. Thank you (x infinity) to mythweaver1 who gave her time and late nights to beta-ing this story. Lastly, thank you for stopping by gentle readers.

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><p><strong>Shadowed<strong>

_-A companion to Moondust-_

I learned to look for his shadow.

Despite my tendency to dismiss his overbearing pride and boasts as mere air, there were a lot more truths to them than I cared to admit. When he wished to remain unseen, he would vanish from your eyes as soon as you blinked. When he was hunting monsters through the wild grass or on rocky terrain, his footsteps made no sound and left no mark of his passage. He struck fast and accurately, his spells devastated and disoriented them. Kills, when made with no interference from us, were quick and merciful.

If it were not for his loud voice and talkativeness, we would have never noticed he was among us.

So I looked for his shadow. At first to avoid it, but my initial abhorred feeling eventually changed. Soon, I looked for the sake of looking. It became a challenge and a source of unending frustration. When found, there was a tingle of triumph…and a small happiness in the finding I would never admit to anyone alive.

Never.

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><p>More than half-way up the mountainside, I could sense that Rosa had had enough. Cecil was pushing us too fast. There was more than urgency in his steps. We could feel his anxiety and worries roll down in waves as he led the way forward into the unknown.<p>

The Lunar Tunnel loomed ahead and Rosa chose that moment to stumble. I assisted her to the ground and glared at the vexing paladin. I loved him as a father and brother all in one, but sometimes he had to give his sense of duty a rest and notice those around him, especially Rosa.

I left them to sort it out, leaving before the situation became any more awkward and before there was any blood shed on Cecil's part. Rosa's temper was terrifying when she had a mind to be.

Edge's shadow was gone, of course. I noticed him slipping away as soon as he made sure it was Rosa's intention to give Cecil a piece of her mind, and not a real injury. I scanned the rocky outcrops, watching for a misplaced slope or an odd bump. He would have been camouflaged, I felt sure of it. I followed a vague path up, looking down all the while. Imagine my shock, then, when I saw him sitting in plain sight, his shadow a definitive beacon to everything below him. It was unlike him, but so like him, to advertise himself in this way to any monsters for miles around.

"Edge?" I made my voice soft in caution, but he heard it anyway. He looked down, nodded to a vacant space on his perch, and went back to his watch. I quelled the galling urge to ask for his help and carefully found enough footholds and handholds to reach the top.

The view was magnificent, if you liked a view of dull grey stones, floating dust motes, and miles of silence. The Blue Planet hung there among millions of stars, softly glowing as if to comfort us. What did the moon have to do with any of this? Why were we even here?

"Rydia."

I was so far away in my own worries that he caught me off-guard. "What?" I asked curtly, in no mood for his blithe chats and word games.

The panicked expression in his eyes told me he was surprised by my tone, but his reaction was so new I almost laughed aloud. The Great Ninja Prince, nervous from a girl's glare? There was no telling what might be around the next corner, though, so I kept my amusement to myself.

A semblance of a conversation transpired. I'm a little ashamed to say I forgot most of it. It was just Edge being Edge…something about ninjas being allergic to foreign particles. All nonsense.

But when Cecil came for us in the end I felt a little more positive about the future. If there were indeed such strange people as dust-allergic ninjas in the world, nothing else would ever surprise me again.

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><p>It was always a source of shock, somehow even after all the time we had spent traveling together, he would <em>appear<em> as if materialized from the very ground. Just as suddenly, he would be gone as if he was never there.

It hadn't taken long before everyone was used to him, but I was never able to accustom myself. The trek up the Tower with him had been annoying, beneath the stress of battles and endless floors of mysterious machinery. One minute, he was there to cajole me or boast of impossible deeds while we walked a few steps behind the others. Other times, he was suddenly at the front of the group; preempting an attack, and assisting Cecil, Kain, Rosa, and me.

I could never decide which I was more annoyed by; the fact that he'd showed up as if invited, or the fact that he'd left as if…as if he was not.

And he was.

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><p>The Subterrane was closed and dark. We made progress only through sheer will and the realization that if we stopped, there will be nothing left of us but scored bones.<p>

It was hard, but not because of the powerful monsters, not even because of the twisting maze of the Subterrane itself. It was hard because everyone was so intent on _not dying_, we forgot all about being _alive_.

So I had a thought. If anyone could remind us what being alive meant, it would be Edge. I searched him out and found his familiar shadow by the cavern entrance. I asked him for stories, and stories he gave us-and so much more.

A small beacon was lit and we kept feeding it small hopes and the idea of a future after Zemus all through the night.

I don't remember if I have ever thanked him for that yet. Maybe someday soon I will be able to.

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><p>The Feymarch. A changeless land, cut off from time's stream. Mortals had no place there, but it was where I had spent most of my unusual childhood. I missed the friends I had and the small things that mattered. How I laughed, learned, lived each day as if it would never end.<p>

I found myself thinking back on those memories often these days, after I had promised myself and the King and Queen that I would live as a normal human in the newly reconstructed Mist. It was hard to find examples to follow. All of my companions were unique individuals in their own right: mighty warriors, gentle healers, great mages, and now several of them rulers…

My mind kept going back to the eternal question that is Edge.

I remembered asking Queen Asura how she met the King in the days when I was standing on the threshold of childhood and enigmatic adulthood. Having lost my real parents and my traveling companions, their majesties were all I have left in the world to go to for comfort and advice. They were 'other', but at times they were also more 'human' than any of us.

I was curious, and also truly troubled in the ways only children could be. Why did they never tell me anything, beyond what was necessary for me to become a full-fledged summoner? So I asked, because I was curious, and because I knew I will have to learn someday about these mysterious bonds that were between Cecil and Rosa, and the King and Queen.

"We met at the Beginning." She smiled and stroked my hair.

"The beginning…of what?" I snuggled onto her lap, one of the last times I ever did.

The Queen shook her head and replied in a sing-song, "It was the Beginning of all, from the times before your life as you know it, and many eons before that still. When history was just a small letter on the beginning of the first page and everything was new and unshaped. The winds were not yet bound to their compass, the lands were torrents of red and gold, and the waters were indifferent between sky and sea. We met in a garden of serene starlight, amidst the endless storms."

The song of the telling lulled me, even though the words were as yet too strange for me to make sense of. I was almost asleep when I remembered she had not answered my question. "So how did you know? If everything was new, how did you know to find each other?"

A rare laugh, "We did not know. We were new and incomplete. He was light, I was shadow. So we met and completed each other. That was all."

I remembered falling asleep to the light of stars and the sound of rain, and thinking none of that made any sense.

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><p>On the battlements of Baron the cool wind snapped out his cloak against the night sky. The torches flared and hid his eyes in shadows. His aloof, masked face, despite all of the joys the day brought, was more than I could stand.<p>

I would not let him slip away again. Not after all this time. We went to the moon and back again, so why couldn't I reach him, when he was standing so close? He was always there, like my own shadow, yet he would always leave again, without a word or a goodbye. There was an eternity of anxiety in me until he was back again, safe and smiling as if he had never gone.

He would always give me his stories, his smiles, his consideration. Why wouldn't he accept anything in return?

"What is with you today, going around with a doomed face whenever people turn their backs?"

I started strong, determined to get my answer, but he made me laugh again despite myself.

He would always do that to me, turn my anger on its head and try to shed a light on our dark shadows, even though he had his own cast over him.

I think we were better friends after that night. I thought maybe a little further into the future I could start to change this light and shadow relationship into something where we were both equal in our giving.

Perhaps I was too hasty. It all seemed but wistful thinking now.

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><p><em>-Closure, or Edge's Art of Making Up-<em>

The pathways in Mist were familiar after months spent here helping in the rebuilding efforts. However this time around instead of the usual straight-cut through the village proper I hugged the border of the greens and stayed out of sight. I admit to overt paranoia, but who knew what the people might have heard from Rydia? For all they believe I might have set beasts after her or something equally mortifying, the way she just flew back here on the first airship available out of Eblan.

I neared my destination, a small home dozing in the warm sunlight, nestled between trees as old as the land. Verdant grass shook from fresh rain, and butterflies floated in the still air. None was disturbed as I crossed the small clearing. The door opened silently and showed a quietly decorated room. The owner was somewhere inside from the distant sounds of washing and the quiet clink of glass. The door swung back as if of its own accord and plunged the receiving room into gloom.

Rydia was drying the last of the glasses as she turned. Her glare could have petrified a behemoth, and I stood quite still in case that was indeed possible.

It was not until she had turned back to put the glass in the cabinet when I found the courage to move, "Rydia, I –"

"Stop right there," she whirled back and snapped. My foot froze mid-air, one hand outstretched, one hand on my pulled-down mask. It might have looked funny but I was thinking of anything but.

Her eyes molten fire, emerald hair a halo…I fell for her all over again, "Look, she wasn't even serious! It was just a small thank-you –"

"Kiss?" she finished, her voice deadly low.

"I – yes, I mean, no! Alright so it was, but –" I felt my courage keel over and die. I had rehearsed this confrontation all during the trek through the cave, so how could I forget _everything_ just because she glared at me?

Suddenly the fire left her and she turned away, "I don't think I can do this anymore. Please leave."

I wouldn't let this end here, not after all that, "Aren't you even going to hear my side of it? I was looking over the reconstruction and then this old lady bumped into me. I helped her up, carried her shopping, and escorted her back to her daughter. I reached her home, and it just so happened that the dancer was her daughter, and I had just saved her a trip about town trying to find her lost mother!"

Even after my unmanly rant she was still unmoved. I tried one more time to reach her, half-resigned to a fate of bachelor-hood but also angry at the unfairness of it all, "The kiss, which you happened to stumbled upon, was a _thank you_ kiss. What in the name of the moons is so wrong with that?"

"There's nothing wrong with it!" she spun back and stormed away through the door.

Of course I followed, "So what, exactly, are you angry about!"

She paced the small room, her hands hiding her face, "I don't even know."

I waited. After a few minutes she stopped by the window and looked out, "Maybe it's because you left without telling me where you were going. I looked through the castle, no one knew where you were, and then when I found you-" She made a noise that said disgust and continued, "Whenever I feel like I'm finally, finally getting somewhere with you, you leave and I'm left hanging. What if it was something serious? What if you never come back? I…I don't think I can face that –"

I reached her in a few steps and turned her chin, "Basically, you're saying you love me."

Blood rushed to her cheeks and she opened her mouth to say something. I didn't let her finish. I don't know how I bridged the distance between our lips, it seemed interminable before, but I attributed it to my subtle ninja skills. That, or mad happiness and sheer luck.

I dreamt of kissing her for so many sleepless nights, the actual one hardly seemed real. I had space enough in my brain only for such disconnected sensations as "soft" and "lemony". The only one clear thought I had was to let her know this was _not_ a thank you kiss. Apparently she understood because she kissed me back. Don't let me tell you how over the moons I was. I'll never finish.

Some breathless eternity later, she was trying to say something again, "Edge, wait –"

I swept her up and in a blink she was on the nearest flat surface, her voice making interesting noises as she moved under my hands. Then a strong right hook struck my nose and I went over the table, "I _said_ wait!"

The world spun, and was righted again when she put her hand to my bruised cheekbone and said, somewhat less apologetically than I would like, "I'll get a cloth."

I sneaked out a hand and pulled her down with me, "You're not going anywhere."

She didn't protest, to my surprise, just laid her soft head of hair on my shoulder, "If your face grows swollen it'll be your own fault, you know."

"It was worth it," I sighed, "So…you _do_ love me?"

A slight nod of the head, "Much to my chagrin."

I let out a wry chuckle. "That's just uncalled for –"

Lips tasting of warm summer stopped me, and said, "And you? Do you love me?"

I looked into her glittering eyes, "With all my crooked heart."

She put her forehead against mine, "Then promise me you'll never leave again without telling me. I don't care if it's into town to get a drink or down to the Underworld. Anywhere you're going, I'm going with you."

"I promise," I swore, and sealed the vow with another kiss…stopping halfway to heaven because she was giggling, "What?"

"Both of my mothers always reminded me to ask permission first before I brought 'friends' home," she tilted her head at me and grinned.

My jaw dropped, "You say this _now_ of all the times? And what are they, Demon Walls or something? I mean, of course one of them is the Queen of Eidolons, but still- "

She kept grinning, "The Queen did approved of you, I suppose, in a manner of speaking," I snorted in answer.

Rydia giggled, "Even so, I never did ask my human mother if I could bring you home,"

I groaned, got to my feet and pulled her up with me, "Fine, we'll do that now. You had better tell her I'm planning on staying, too."

As we walked out, I looked back.

Our shadows grew long from the setting sun and were meld together as one.


End file.
